How Luis Grass turned some very old Detroit iron into
a seagoing escape vehicle. Twice.

BY JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANTHONY NESTE

In the ’60s, at the height of the Cold War, communist Cuba seemed dangerously
close to the United States. After all, 90 miles is no distance at all for
a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.

But the Florida Strait is treacherous — a tough 90 miles to cover in
any boat. With the Gulf Stream surging through along with the strong Florida
Current, it’s usually windy with heavy swells. In hurricane season, the
murderous storms seem to head right into it. Of course, there are plenty
of sharks, too.

But it’s vastly more perilous crossing it in a Chevrolet, Buick, or
Mercury.

“In the ocean the biggest boat is still, like, a little thing,” explains
Luis Grass, now 38, who in July 2003 took 11 of his family and friends
and almost made it to the U.S. aboard a green 1951 Chevrolet two-ton truck
he had made, if not strictly seaworthy, at least seaworthy enough.

Whatever the motivation — economic, political, religious, or familial
— Cubans have a massive incentive to risk their lives trying to make it
to the U.S. “The way it works is that any Cuban who reaches the United
States is automatically entitled to stay,” says David Abraham, a professor
of immigration and citizenship law at the University of Miami, explaining
the situation created by the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, “and
after one year, to pursue citizenship. This is not offered to any other
country’s citizens. It doesn’t matter if that’s Haiti, Canada, or Jamaica.
Cuba is the only exception. The issue then is: What does it mean to reach?”

Currently, reach means, in practical terms, setting foot on dry land.
“It’s the wet-foot/dry-foot agreement,” Abraham explains, describing the
compromise policy that emerged after the 1994 balsero (“rafter”) crisis,
when Fidel Castro responded to riots in Havana by announcing that his government
would no longer prevent “illegal” departures and thousands of Cubans fled
the island on makeshift rafts. “If they reach the shore,” Abraham continues,
“they stay. But if they’re interdicted at sea, they get a quick interview
to determine if, as individuals, they are at risk of being persecuted and,
if not, they’re sent back to Cuba. What this generates is people who will
fight off the Coast Guard to make the shore. Having dry feet means you’re
home free.”

Luis Grass has the taut, lean body of the tae kwon do competitor he
was in Cuba (he says he holds a black belt in the martial art). If he’s
taller than five foot six, it’s not by much, and his perfect posture makes
every one of those inches count. Even though his grasp of English is slight
(and this writer’s Spanish worse), he looks you straight in the eye as
you speak, apparently out of courtesy and a sincere attempt to understand
all that he can. He’s quick, animated, and obviously smart. He’s also a
confident man, someone fearless enough to load himself, his second wife,
Isora, and his young son, Angel Luis, along with nine friends, aboard a
52-year-old truck and drive it into the Atlantic Ocean, trusting that his
craftsmanship, navigation skills, and cheap compass would get them to Florida.

In Havana, Grass made a living hauling sugar cane with his Chevy truck
to make guarapo (a beverage based on sugar-cane juice) and running an illegal
car-repair shop. When the Cuban government closed his shop and confiscated
the truck when he tried to change its title, he decided the time had come
to head for Florida. “They took everything away from me — the paperwork
and the keys. But I had an extra spare key in the glove compartment.” So
he used that key to retrieve the truck from the military depot where the
government had stored it — a place so chaotic with activity he’s not sure
they ever knew he took it back. He drove it to his friend Marciel Basanta’s
house and hid it. “After about 12 days, my wife and some friends went to
the beach, and I was looking out at the horizon, and I told my wife, ‘You
know, my love, we have to do this. That’s the only way to get out of here.
I have no other choice.’”

His wife and friends came to the conclusion that he was nuts. But he
was determined, so he went home, drew up some plans, and then started scheming
ways to scrounge together the necessary parts and pieces to turn his truck
into an ocean liner of sorts.

Grass had more than just intuition to apply when modifying his truck.
He had trained as a naval engineer in Cuba but dropped out of the program
during the fourth of his six years of study when, he says, the military
commitment and the Communist Party membership that go with such training
kicked in. So, on an island nation where private ownership of boats is
illegal, he was one of the few people who knew how to build them.

Turning an ancient Chevy truck into an oceangoing vessel is actually
rather straightforward. Working in a makeshift shop at Basanta’s house,
the two men sealed the bottom of the truck into a relatively flat hull
with welded sheetmetal.

To stabilize it, six empty oil drums made of steel were lashed to each
side to form pontoons, and a small prow was fabricated to sit ahead of
the front bumper and cut through the water. Another section of hull was
lashed behind the truck to balance the vehicle relative to its height and
width. Power came from the truck’s ancient 236-cubic-inch six-cylinder
engine (rated at 92 horsepower when it was new, before a half-century’s
seasoning in Cuban agriculture) with a transfer case behind the transmission
feeding a second driveshaft and ultimately a 16-inch propeller Grass had
scavenged. Cables attached to the tie-rod ends ran back to a fabricated
rudder so that turning the truck’s steering wheel moved it appropriately
(there was also a tiller, should the cables fail).

To launch the truck, all Grass and his crew had to do was drive across
the hard-packed sands of Havana’s Brisas Del Mar beach (a popular departure
point for rafters) into the Atlantic and then head north. Once they hit
another beach in the U.S., Grass figured, they would “drive directly to
a gas station, buy some gas, and drive it” to Miami. That’s the clear advantage
sailing a truck to Florida has over a raft.

Laden with about 106 gallons of surreptitiously accumulated gasoline
and enough provisions to sustain the 12 people aboard, the Chevrolet entered
the surf at 3 a.m. in the darkness, at high tide, on July 15, 2003, and
started its slog across the strait. It turns out that 1951 Chevy two-ton
trucks aren’t hydrodynamically efficient. Although the truck was stable
and might have been capable of three or four knots under ideal circumstances,
during this 31-hour voyage, the Chevy only made it to within about 40 miles
of the Florida coast.

Grass spent most of that time in the truck’s cab as pilot and captain,
while the passengers held fast in the truck’s bed, protected by a canvas
cover and eating cold cuts and crackers. Sometimes one or two would wander
onto the pontoons, but even though the seas were unusually calm, most of
them got seasick. Although it was hardly a luxurious voyage, the Chevy
was slow and stable and chugged on reliably. It never came close to sinking.

But it was spotted by a U.S. Customs aircraft and intercepted by the
Coast Guard.

“They lied,” Grass claims of his first encounter with the Coast Guard.
“They told me they had an immigration official on board [the cutter] and
that we might be able to get into the United States. But I didn’t want
to give them the truck because it was my property. And they said, ‘We’re
not going to sink it. We’re going to put it in a museum.’”

“He may have misunderstood because he doesn’t speak English,” says Luis
Diaz, a public-affairs official for the Coast Guard. “We would not take
out a cutter just to be a tow service.” The Coast Guard’s district commander
at the time, Rear Admiral Harvey Johnson, also told the Miami Herald that
the truck had been sunk because its survival and probable public display
(in a museum exhibit or otherwise) would have been “an encouragement for
people in Cuba to think they need to make it to the United States.” The
Coast Guard ends up caught between enforcing immigration laws and a law
that grants a direct path to citizenship to Cubans who make it to dry land.

So after everyone was off the truck and safely aboard the cutter, the
Coast Guard used the automatic fire of their deck guns to sink the ancient
green truck. “It was sinking,” Grass recalls painfully, who was given earplugs
before the shooting began, “and you could still see, like, the top of it.
Then they came back and kept shooting at it, and it kept coming back.”
But eventually, it went down and stayed down.

By the time the Coast Guard took the truck’s occupants to the U.S. Naval
Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for three days of processing back into their
native country, their story had gotten a lot of press in Florida, and a
new word was forged to describe them: camionautas. In English, that translates
to “truckonauts.”

Although Cuba promises to allow intercepted citizens returned there
by the U.S. to go to their homes, on his return Grass spent seven days
under house arrest at a military base and says he was later harassed. Plus,
with his shop closed and no truck, he couldn’t really make a living.

So it wasn’t long before he was looking for another way to get to Miami.
He found it in the form of a derelict ’59 Buick four-door Electra hardtop.

Applying lessons he learned with the truck to the light-green Buick,
he built the car-boat using a vee-shaped hull and a more pointed prow to
make it faster in the water, and of course it had a Buick V-8 for power.
The propeller ran off a transfer case and a second driveshaft and was placed
inside a tunnel to maximize its efficiency. As with the truck, the Buick’s
rear-mounted rudder was controlled by cables connected to the tie-rod ends.
There was no need for the pontoons used on the truck.

“There was more technology in the Buick,” says Grass. “If the car would
fill with water, there were pumps that would just throw the water out.”
Loaded with 11 people (Grass’s family plus Basanta’s family and another
friend, Rafael Diaz, and his family), the Buick set out for Florida at
7 p.m. on February 2, 2004. The oceangoing Buick got within 10 miles of
the American coastline before it was again intercepted by the Coast Guard,
which claims to have sunk the Buick. But Grass didn’t see it go down and
doesn’t believe it did.

“So the Buick,” Grass asserts adamantly, “they wanted to sink it as
well. But they couldn’t. Because we put Styrofoam into all the compartments.
If you would drop it from a third floor into the sea, it would just come
back. I think they have it stored. When I was in Guantanamo Bay, an officer
told me, ‘They never sank your boat. It is stored somewhere, and they’re
going to put it in a museum.’”

Wherever the Buick wound up, after convincing immigration authorities
this time that the consequences in Cuba for them would be grave, the Grass
family was interred at Guantanamo Bay while the rest of their fellow truckonauts
were sent back into Cuba. And they stayed in Gitmo for a full 10 months
while the U.S. government figured out what to do with them. They were treated
well there, says Grass, but even a pleasant jail is still a jail, and it
was particularly tough on his then-four-year-old son. Eventually, the Grass
family forced the issue with a brief hunger strike during September of
that year, and they were granted refugee status by Costa Rica. They were
flown to that country on December 1, 2004, with the promise of financial
aid from the United States to help them adapt to the new surroundings.

But the point of all Luis Grass’s efforts was always to get to the U.S.,
and Miami in particular. So they didn’t stay long in Costa Rica.

By early 2005, Grass and his family were in the process of hitchhiking
the 2100-or-so convoluted miles through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala,
and Mexico, to finally cross into the U.S. six weeks later in mid-March
at Matamoras. That entire journey was done without passports, visas, or
any other legal papers, although Grass did pick up financial help from
relatives in the U.S. who sent him cash along the way via Western Union.
It was a journey Grass says was much more harrowing than his sea voyages.

In Texas, the little group applied for political asylum, and after they
were held in Brownsville for two days, it was granted. They went straight
to Miami.

While Grass was making his overland journey, friend Rafael Diaz was
back in Cuba modifying a blue 1948 Mercury airport transport car along
the same lines as the Buick. On June 5, 2005, Diaz, his wife and two children,
and nine others (including Marciel Basanta and his family) were intercepted
just south of the Florida Keys, and because the Diaz family had already
arranged U.S. visas, they were allowed into the country. The Coast Guard
sank that vehicle, too.

The photographs of the truckonauts at sea make them appear almost cute.
Their brightly colored vehicles are undeniably ingenious, and since they
were built from ancient and familiar American iron, the affection is immediate.
Plus, it’s flattering that so much effort would go into an attempt to make
it to the Land of the Free. It all plays into our preconceptions of Cuba
as a place filled with people yearning for freedom as well as classic American
cars from the ’50s.

But that all conspires to downplay how seriously dangerous those voyages
were. In April this year, the Cuban Coast Guard fired at suspected migrant
smugglers and is believed to have killed one person. In April 2005, the
U.S. Coast Guard rescued three severely dehydrated Cubans who survived
the capsizing of another smuggling craft — their 31 shipmates are not believed
to have survived being thrown into the shark-infested waters. The U.S.
Coast Guard made 10,716 interdictions at sea (1499 of which were Cubans
— third by nationality behind Haitians and Dominicans) during 2004, and
no one really knows how many people are drowning trying to get here. The
truckonauts were staggeringly lucky.

The Cuban community in and around Miami is a tight one, and the truckonauts
were accepted into it. Luis Grass quickly found a job at Maroone Chevrolet
of West Dade as a line mechanic and plunged into learning the latest diagnostic
tools. His wife took a job making sandwiches at a deli in a Shell station.
Diaz found work in a body shop. Basanta and his family, plus Grass’s two
children from his first marriage, remain in Cuba.

Maroone Chevrolet’s general manager, Raúl de la Milera, a Cuban
émigré himself, has been working with Grass and other mechanics
at the dealership to convert a 1953 Chevrolet truck they located into a
near duplicate of the original truckonaut machine. This new truck isn’t
in great shape — there are places where the body has rotted through — but
according to Grass, it’s in “much, much better condition” than what he
started with in Cuba. It makes his accomplishment that much more impressive.

The Grass family lives in a large, nondescript Hialeah apartment building
with Luis’s uncle. Their home is spotless, comfortable, and modestly furnished.

One of his first purchases after settling in Florida was a new Chevrolet
TrailBlazer. He’s a firm fan of GM products, and there was a good rebate
available. It would be an unthinkably luxurious vehicle in Cuba, where
the per capita gross domestic product is only about $3300 — about 1/13th
that of the United States — and new vehicles are rare and usually government-owned.

That TrailBlazer has also introduced him to that most American of consumer
institutions — GMAC financing. Is it intimidating for him to owe that much
money? “No,” he says. “In life you have to set goals. Whoever lives in
fear doesn’t deserve to live.”